Tag: vagabonds

The week of Thanksgiving, Andy and I flew to Denver, rented a car, and road-tripped through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and back through Colorado.

We were struggling through a November sub-zero cold snap as well as major restructuring at our company, so we broke out into the sunny big blue skies of the west. The world felt big and our imaginations expanded to match.

Highlights were seeing our friends and meeting their adorable new baby in Grand Junction, having Maria Carey jaywalk in front of our car in Aspen, a Breaking Bad self-guided tour in Albuquerque, and hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

We drove into Grand Canyon National Park in the pitch black, aware of a gaping hole next to the road. We jumped out of bed to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise.

The bottom of the Grand Canyon is a different world–only reached by foot, mule or raft. We stayed overnight in the men’s and women’s dorms of Phantom Ranch. Andy picked me up from my dorm after dinner for a 50’s-style date of card playing and a beer in The Canteen.

The next morning I picked up Andy at his dorm around 6am, telling him I had found coffee. We sat in the dark at a picnic table under the stars talking until family-style breakfast was served. Without smart phones to distract us and remind us how things were, we thought big about how things could be.

When we hiked out of the Canyon that day, we felt the tension of both wanting to reach the top to rest our cramped muscles, and never wanting to reach the top. But we kept walking, reached the top, hobbled into our rented Camry and were off to New Mexico.

Two days after being at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, we found ourselves at 11,000 feet crossing Molas Pass in Colorado.

We were busy on our trip, but not once in a hurry. Somewhere on the road, we talked about what we wanted to take with us. For me it was the feeling of bigness and possibility. As small as a current situation might seem, never losing that feeling within of the big sky and big canyon.

The word grand must have held more meaning when this place was named. We never imagined the many layers we would walk through to reach the bottom.